My Journey With Inquiry-Based Learning

The author chronicles his experiments with inquiry-based learning (IBL) as he applied lessons from the literature and assessed the results. He describes a difficult journey with the result that, with the help of the literature, supportive colleagues and patient, creative students, he learned how to design courses that invite undergraduates to become more critical, more complex, and more autonomous thinkers. Readers of this article will, he hopes, avoid some of the pitfalls that he encountered. I had a problem. I saw it in my students every day. Their faces, their postures, and their incessant checking of electronic devices all told me that they wanted to be somewhere other than in my class—whatever it happened to be. No matter how high my standards, or how polished my lectures, most of my students engaged with my courses only when required to do so—for an exam or paper, for example. On those days, my courses resembled an exercise in pedagogic dentistry, with me as the puller of teeth. I had my successes, of course. From time to time, a student would become intrigued by history, but such students were too few to satisfy me. Making matters worse (I say only half in jest), I could not bring myself to blame the students; as a graduate student, I had seen faculty blame undergraduates when their courses did not “work,” and I knew that student blaming offered only false consolation and no solution. Eventually, I found a way out of this situation. My road to recovery ran straight through teaching and learning conferences (like the Lilly Conference on College Teaching), journals (like this one), and institutes (like Ken Bain’s; see Bain, 2004) In those settings, surrounded by faculty confronting problems similar to mine, I found an answer to the problem of student engagement: the inquiry-driven classroom. If I turned my classroom into a place where students answered questions, rather than memorized answers, so I was told, they would become more engaged in